My 3D Work

I made a model of Lewis Carol's Jabberwock based on John Tenniel's illustration. This has a turntable and a quick rig demonstration.

I needed a robot model for a silly poster that I had planned and really only needed his upper half but got carried away and wound up making the whole thing. He's supposed to have sparks spraying out of random joints but I wasn't happy with the results I was getting and decided to leave them out for now. I named him Kupfer Oben because I looked up the German for Copper Top on Google Translator and that's what I got. I make no claims of accuracy.

Growing up, Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes was my favorite comic strip. I bought every collection I could fine and even cut out the comics from my newspaper to be sure I never missed out on any. And of all his alter egos (from superheros to the infamous Calvinosauris) the intrepid explorer, Spaceman Spiff, was definitely the best.

That's why I knew I had to take crack at modeling him as well as his little red space ship.

Zentraedi Battle Pod modeled with Maya. Someone not familiar with Robotech told me it looked unfinished. I assume that was because it doesn't have any arms, but battle pods don't have any.

This weekend I had this sudden urge to make a Dalek, so I did. I considered making one from the original series, but decided after some research that those were a little too simple. Took just under a day and a half for modeling and texturing.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

My model of Brain from Pinky and The Brain as part of a request for more characters that people can recognize rather than making up my own. Took about two days.

I don't normally model pre-existing characters. I've got enough random stuff popping up in my head to deal with already. Plus there's no fun making a character that's been done so many times before. But I got a request for a quick Darth Vader bust. From looking for reference images to final rendering it took about a day and a half.

Abrams tank I modeled as an example for my Intro to Maya class. It was my first tank and I'm actually quite happy with how it turned out. I also had it printed on Shapeways. That's the only reason why there's so much unnecessary geometry on the tank treads.

Soul Thieves, Time Poachers, and Illegal Immortals, the Fairy Tale Division has many different names for the beings that extend their lives by stealing the time allotted to living souls. There are even more methods for obtaining this time. A Witches Tool is the generic name for any of the devices or creatures created by the magic users who have stumbled upon the dark secrets of Immortality.

The Chamera is hybrid creature spliced together with magic. It's got the body of a lion, the tail of a cobra, the ears and horns of a goat, and a face only a photographer could love. One flash and her subject's soul is captured on a photographic plate stored at the back of its head, under the black cloth to be retrieved later by her master.

This is part of a continuing project which you and find here: Little Red Reaping Hood

The Grim Reaper's Fairy Tale Division hunts down evil creatures that feed on the lives and souls of mortals, like soul swallowing dark witches, man eating werewolves, and cursed dolls that steal people's allotted time for their own use.

Agent Wood is the exception. this clockwork, wooden boy has something that no other magically animated being possesses: Mortality. His father, an artisan skilled in clockwork, was duped into building countless wooden children with magic runes carved into them and distributed the toys to the children of his village. With a turn of the key they sprang to life and he became highly successful . . . until the children began to sicken as the dolls stole their lives away.

Driven from his home by angry mobs, he was determined to make one last doll. One that would have his own measurement of life in the form of a ball bearing filled hourglass inside his chest. Every time the key is turned a bearing drops and when they're all gone, his life is over. As a rookie to the FTD he's the unwilling and unwanted partner to Agent hood, but he'll put up with anything if it means he has the chance to hunt down his evil brothers and sisters that destroyed his father's life.


This is part of a continuing project which you and find here: Little Red Reaping Hood

The Grim Reaper's Fairy Tale Division polices the witches, werewolves, and various other evil beings that have escaped Death's bony grasp and now fuel their immortal lives with the souls of mortal humans.

Agent Hood specializes and takes particular pleasure in slaying wolves. She's already lost her first three partners to an especially big, bad wolf and now the rest of the agents of the FTD refuse to work with her, but that's OK with her. She's on the hunt and partners just get in the way. All she wants is to find the one that got away and plant her silver engraved boot tips where the Moon don't shine.


This is part of a continuing project which you and find here: Little Red Reaping Hood

Made a snail model to go along with the shell model I made a couple years ago. He's rigged for animation and even has expressions written to make his edges ripple automatically.

My first attempt at modeling a motorcycle. I'm pretty happy with how it came out. Couldn't decide what color to make it, so I gave it eight different paint jobs, which I've got on display here. Also includes the ambient occlusion and wire frame passes.

After my grandmother died, my parents brought back a table as one of numerous keepsakes split up amongst the family. I don't know how old it is, but I think she'd had it for at least sixty years and even though she'd had it longer than I can remember. I do know it was hand made and without the aid of power tools.

I'd never really seen it. It was always covered in random knickknacks that had been collected over a lifetime of collecting random knickknacks for as long as I had known it. In fact, I even saw it as a bit of a nuisance as it always seemed to block the path I needed to take on my way to where she'd set up a bed for me whenever we stayed. But my parents liked it so they took it home and my mother cleaned it up.

When I cam home for the holidays and finally got my first real look at it I couldn't help but think, "Wow, that is a nice table. I must model it!" So my father snapped a whole lot of pictures and we took some measurements and after heading off again I got down to modeling it in Maya. I even recreated the latching mechanism as best as I could so that turning the lever underneath really locks and unlocks it so you can open it up and put in the leaves.

H. P. Lovecraft's creation, Cthulhu, has never looked better. Based on a drawing I made a while back, this should be the first of several low polygon 3D models I'm going to begin working on, hopefully to be used as part of an online webcomic.

This model spin includes wire frame, ambient occlusion, and stereoscopic renders, so I hope you brought your 3D glasses.

At the end I've included video capture demonstrating the rigging I set up to control him. I don't claim to be an expert rigger, but I had fun with this one and I don't see any reason not to show it off.

A while back I woke up with a vague outline of a strange four legged creature crawling through my head on half-hoofed hands. The more I tried to work out what it was, how it looked, and why it was that way the longer the story behind it -and the rider who I eventually put on its back- became.

Now I don't claim to be a writer in any way shape or form, but I had so much fun thinking this thing through that I'm including the short version here with the model spin:

The frigid planet Boreas was never intended for colonization, but they're here now and no one's making them leave.

An ancient cataclysm left Boreas shifted away from its star, rapidly cooled, and with a sudden extinction of most of its plant life. Growing polar ice caps drain the surface of liquid water. The narrow band of ice free land is mostly barren, frozen dirt and rock covered in a thin layer of red, land dwelling algae.

Most of the pre-cataclysm life forms died out long ago, but the Boreas Pony is a survivor. Their ancestors once had a blossoming civilization but regressed in the hostile environment to hoofed quadrupedal predators with only a few remaining fingers from once dexterous hands.

Three generations ago a colony transport suffered engine failure and made an emergency landing on Boreas. After managing to eke out a living on their own help has finally arrived, in the form of an interstellar mining consortium. They're here to move the colonists to their proper home and excavate the dying planet's untapped mineral resources.

There's just one problem: the colonists don't want to leave! They want Boreas terraformed. A thicker atmosphere and the greenhouse effect could turn the ice caps back and return the planet to its warm, water covered past.

Now, behind the negotiations and the public relations battles there is a war going on between the miners and the terraformer's radical wing, the Army of the Blue Dawn.

I've recently begun work with Muse Games as a zBrush Artist on their upcoming game, Guns of Icarus. I hope to include examples from my work after it's released. In the meantime, here's the trailer. I made the normal maps for the character you see running and jumping around in that as well as assisting with his color map.

My second demo reel for 3D modeling with Maya and ZBrush and texturing with Adobe Photoshop. Consists of five models.

1. Dinomask is, well, a dinosaur wearing a gas mask and carrying a pair of air tanks on his back. I'll let you create your own explanation as to why. Spin includes a character sketch as well as textured, wireframe, and ambient occlusion passes.

2. The Lantern Holder is a sort of . . . half man, half angler fish creature. Instead of a bioluminescent lure growing out of his head he's got a third arm holding a lantern. He uses it to confuse passing ships at night and make them crash on the rocks. Spin includes textured, wireframe, and ambient occlusion passes.

3. Prometheants is the moment of triumph for a group of ants who have taken possession of mankind's greatest weapon. Spin includes textured, wireframe, and ambient occlusion passes.

4. Lanky was the only name I could ever come up with for this tall, skinny alien creature whose shape popped into my head one morning before I'd completely woken up. Spin includes character sketches as well as textured, wireframe, and ambient occlusion passes.

5. The Unstoppable Cancer is probably the worst idea for a super hero ever. He has no super powers and his costume is the same one he wore as the mascot for Earnest's Crab Shack. Spin includes a rough character sketch as well as textured, wireframe, and ambient occlusion passes and even a brief animation using a line borrowed from Lewis Black.

A short video I was hired to make for the PR of a film called Before We Close.

All image elements were provided to me by my employers and I manipulated them in AfterEffects.

It's a scarab beetle filled with gears! Inspired by Mike Libby's Insect Lab: www.insectlabstudio.com

Created in Maya, the gears are controlled by expressions so they will automatically rotate as he moves.

I have recently redone this using Maya 2009's stereoscopic camera setup. Check it out if you've got your 3D glasses handy!

ZBGlobal hired me to make a promotional video for their online platform, ZBvillage. They provided the soundtrack and art used in the video and I animated it in AfterEffects as well as recreating the village they'd drawn as 3D buildings in Maya for the fly through.

zbglobal.com
zbvillage.com

Inspired by M. C. Escher's Mobius Strip II, which has always been one of my favorites. It's nowhere near an exact reproduction, but it's good enough to make me happy.

"We have harnessed the power of the Gods."

A group of ants work together to lift aloft a magnifying glass. Now they are gods among ants.

I originally only planned on making a t-shirt out of this idea, but was having trouble drawing it. In the end I decided it would be more fun to model it in Maya first and make a 2D design out of it later.

I'm giving the magnifying glass model away on Turbosquid.

And the ant itself is for sale in several formats.

His name is Grrmane the Inclement and he is an Ogre . . . who works in a library. Dissatisfied with the stereotypical Ogre life of clubbing and eating the smaller peoples of the world, Grrmane chose to enter a life of academia and pursued the peaceful profession of librarian. As the only Ogre ever to fully master the Dewey Decimal System, he and the library he runs have become legendary amongst others in his field. As long as he remains, no book is ever returned late, no cover is ever bent, and, of course, no voice is ever raised above a whisper.

This was made for a contest held by Animation Magazine called the Face-2-Face contest. There were two categories, game level and film level heads and various subcategories for the types of heads we could enter. I had read the subcategories in the contest guidelines, but had yet to settle on the type of head I should make. I hadn't originally even intended to enter the subcategory that I did at the time (Non-human Humanoid), but then I read further and came across "Any image deemed to contain content that depicts violence . . . will be disqualified and removed." I immediately remembered the Non-human Humanoid suggestions of orcs and goblins without suggesting violence? These creatures are always depicted as violent to the most homicidal extreme. Then I remembered an episode of Flight of the Conchords, where Jemaine Clement was described as looking like "an ogre who works in a library" and remembered that I had wanted to make just such a character for some time.

It's a dinosaur wearing a gas mask and carrying air tanks. What more is there to say?

I first drew it for a t-shirt, but decided I should model it in Maya. I then sculpted it in ZBrush, but this is a lower res version using normal maps.

This model is for sale on Turbosquid in OJB, FBX, and ZTL formats.

I work off and on for Platt College in San Diego as a Teacher's Assistant. It's not a particularly big school, but every now and then we get some important people turning up to give talks to the students. One day, Lou Romano (Production Designer and sometimes voice actor from Pixar) agreed to stop by. The school asked me to model and animate his head as a sort of thank-you gift. I modeled it, rigged it, animated it, and made the color maps. An instructor created the rest of the texture maps and set up the subsurface scattering shader.

He seemed to enjoy it and said I could share it around, even though I kind of borrowed his voice from Ratatouille.

Made with Maya, ZBrush, and Photoshop.

Sorry about the quality, but I can't seem to find my original files to make a better version of this. This video plus another with a more detailed look at the color change and some close up renders can be found on my old web page: http://will-lapuerta.com/3d/Chameleon.htm

I created this animation for Steve Bolt of Glory Be Collectibles. The idea was that this would serve as a teaser for the creation of a full length animation based on the children's book The Adventures of Brisky Bear & Trooper Dog: Be Kind, Be Friendly, Be Thankful. I'm currently working on a second version of this and hope to have that posted here as well some time soon.

All work done with Maya, Photoshop, and After Effects. The background was produced by the book's illustrator, Sharon Dahl.

Idiot Box popped into my head one day during a long walk. A tv set with a bunch of little crab legs scurrying along. I just thought the idea was so cute I went ahead and made him in Maya.

Later, when I found out I would have a class project using Boujou to track camera motion and composite 3d into live footage, I knew my little Idiot Box had to star in it.

The best part was getting to walk around the school and shout at something that wasn't even there. I wonder what people thought I was doing . . .

"Yeah, that Ryan guy's gone crazy. I knew it had to happen eventually . . ."